The Lonely Island Is Bringing More Sketch Comedy to Saturday Nights with Lorne Michaels' Blessing

There are (probably) not actually any boats involved, but the comedy/rap group, consisting of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, is getting back into the Saturday night sketch comedy game after several years away from Saturday Night Live.

Along with The League'sPaul Scheer, they're now executive producing a new half-hour sketch show for Fox called Party Over Here, starring comedians Nicole Byer, Jessica McKenna, and Alison Rich. The show will air on Saturday nights, but at 11 p.m., meaning it will air just before SNL starts at 11:30.

While some were reporting the new show as a rival to the reigning king of late night sketch comedy, that's not actually the case at all.

"One of our stipulations to Fox was that we wouldnt air at the same time as @nbcsnl," the group tweeted after a fan asked them to explain. "This show is over at 11:30.

There's also no bad blood between the guys and their former boss, Lorne Michaels.

The Lonely Island basically ruled SNL for many years, starting when Andy Samberg joined the cast in 2005. Their video, Lazy Sunday—a charming gangster rap about going out for cupcakes and seeing The Chronicles of Narnia—took the world by storm and was one of the first viral videos on Youtube.

They went on to produce some of the best video content that has ever come out of SNL, if you ask us (and you shouldn't, because we will perform the entirety of "I'm On a Boat" for you), and the show hasn't been quite the same since Andy's departure in 2012. Still good, but not the same.

The new show will cover "everything from pop culture to politics" and will feature both sketch comedy shorts and in-studio segments filmed in front of a live audience in Los Angeles.

"When we first conceived this idea, we thought of it as a spinoff of Empire," said The Lonely Island. "We failed miserably…now it's much more of a sketch comedy show."

We would have gladly taken the Empire spin-off, but sketch comedy works too.